Learn how to design a test automation framework for automating web-based applications.

Test Automation

Testing the user interface for any application is generally time-consuming when done for each new release. UI test automation is the most common and effective way to simulate the actual user journey and business use cases for any application.

In this module, we’ll learn to design a test automation framework from scratch to automate any web-based application using Java, Selenium, and TestNG. We’ll start by learning the basics of Selenium and TestNG and then learn about build management, logging, and reporting, all of which are key concepts for any QA engineer or developer. By the end of this module, we will successfully create a UI test automation framework.

Design a Test Automation Framework with Selenium and Java

# Need for `DataManager`

Oftentimes, we will be using some static test data that is specific to an environment. The environment could be staging, production, development, etc. For maintaining the environment, we can have a separate class for managing that. This allows us to manage test data in an environment-agnostic way.


# Creating `DataManager`

We can store the test data in any file format. For demonstration purposes, `.properties` file is considered.

```java

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Properties;

public class DataManager {

	private static final Properties PROPERTIES = new Properties();

	private static final String ENV = ConfigurationManager.getInstance().getProperty("env");

	private DataManager() throws IOException {
		PROPERTIES.load(getInputStream("env-test-data.properties"));
	}

	private static DataManager manager;

	public static DataManager getInstance() {

		if (manager == null) {
			synchronized (ConfigurationManager.class) {
				if (manager == null) {
					try {
						manager = new DataManager();
					} catch (IOException e) {
					}
				}
			}
		}
		return manager;
	}

	public String getString(String name) {
        String key = ENV + "." + name;
		return System.getProperty(key, PROPERTIES.getProperty(key));
	}

	private InputStream getInputStream(String file) {

		try {
			List<URL> urls = Collections.list(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResources(file));
			return urls == null || urls.isEmpty() ? null : urls.get(0).openStream();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		return null;
	}
}

```

In the above code snippet, we are:
* creating a singleton instance of `DataManager`class in the `getInstance` method.
* reading properties file from `src/test/resources/env-test-data.properties` in the constructor of the class.
* fetching the property key's value from the `System.properties`. If not present, then fetch from the properties from `src/test/resources/env-test-data.properties`. This gives us the flexibility to override the properties from the command line as well.

# Creating a test data file

`env-test-data.properties` should to be created under `src/test/resources`, as it is a test resource, so that it can be read from classpath when running the test suite. 

```
stage.user_email = test_user@example.com

prod.user_email = test_user@example.com
```

Here, we prefix the test data key with the environment and set their respective values.

# Usage

Assuming `env` (or an environment that is passed as configuration from command line as `-Denv=stage`) is set to some value and the respective values exist in `src/test/resources/env-test-data.properties` in the format expected and discussed previously, we can access the value of the `env` test data using the following code. 

```
String userEmail = DataManager.getInstance().getString("user_email");
```

---

In the next lesson, we will learn how to put all the concepts learned till now and design a complete UI framework.

In this lesson, we will learn how to manage test data that are specific to the environment that we are running our test suite against.

Data Management

Need for DataManager

Need for `DataManager`